Paul Ongenae

Beyond pitfalls and wishful thinking: public added value of social enterprises in the health care sector

Health care organizations, especially in the care sector, find themselves in a changing environment, due new defrayment rules, law and regulations. Also the upcoming retirement of the baby-boom generation and the deficit of birth rates in our society, will increase the demand in the near future of a higher participation rate for labour disabled people.

Healthcare organizations have to search and deal in this changing environment with new organizational concepts, such as social enterprises and are also confronted with their changing role in the society. Despite their changing role the demand for accountability will increase by the stakeholders. Regardless of several research projects, experiments and changing law and regulations, the relationship between social enterprises, initialized by health care organizations and labour related projects, is not clear. A more structural research is needed to investigate their changing role and gather information about the public added value of social enterprises initiated by healthcare organizations. This vision compares with the new social policy themes, governance and participation, appointed as spearheads by the government for the next five years.

This research proposes to investigate how social enterprises in the health care sector, create, identify and account public added value for labour disabled people, social enterprises (initiated by healthcare organizations) and society, by conducting several case studies at multiple organizations.